They ate simple pasta with dried cheese and salad from the aeroponics room, which wasn’t actually bad at all. Marco ate a man-sized portion, seemingly without pause for air. Eli left them alone around seven, and Marco voluntarily turned in early, which was unusual for him. Lina had just been summoning up the courage to talk to him about Platini, but she was almost relieved when he went to bed before she could actually broach the subject. Her belly full, and her mind finally at rest, sleep took her by stealth as she lay on the sofa and carried her off into a mercifully dreamless slumber.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lina awoke suddenly to the unmistakeable sound of an explosion, scrabbling upright in shock. The holo was off and as she sat there, eyes darting in fear, the lights slowly dimmed away to nothing and darkness grew out of the air itself, gradually filling the room. She sat, breathing heavily, trying to still her jittering heart. Then suddenly the emergency lights came on, a weak and bloody haze of red.
She stood slowly, unsure of what she intended to do, still confused by sleep. She cocked her head, listening intently. The station was ominously quiet. The refinery had been shut down since the Kays had ceased operation, but now she heard nothing. The silence was almost a tangible thing, an anti-sound. The sound of a thousand machines not working. Far off, somebody began shouting in a voice that warbled close to panic.
What blew up? Something blew up. . . The powerplant? Whatever it was, it had sounded big, and therefore serious. It must have been the powerplant, she thought fearfully, glancing up at the emergency lights. Macao was powered primarily by a low-cost fission reactor. If something had gone wrong there then they could all be dead in minutes. Marco! she thought frantically, and made for his room on legs that shook and jerked at the knees, threatening to betray her and spill her onto her face. She practically fell through his door, scrabbling at the frame to retain her balance.
Marco was stirring in his sleep, on the brink of waking. Lina dashed to his side and put her arms round him, making him jump and mumble something incoherent. His eyes opened and he looked up at her.
‘Mum. . .’
‘Honey, something’s wrong with the power,’ she said, smoothing his hair and looking into his young face, which had a spectral appearance in the red light. ‘I’m gonna go and try to find out what’s happening.’ She hoped she didn’t sound as terrified as she felt. The little voice far back in her head was chanting What’s wrong now? What’s wrong now? What’s wrong now?
‘Eh?’ he asked, trying to sit up and failing. He looked around himself blearily, noticing the emergency lighting. ‘Oh,’ he said in summary.
‘I want you to stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ She peered into his face, gauging his comprehension. ‘Yes?’ she prompted, shaking him smartly, once, by the shoulders.
‘Yeah,’ he replied uncertainly, his gaze somewhat unfocused. ‘Sure.’ And with that, amazing and gladdening Lina in equal measure, he actually lay back down and returned immediately to sleep.
She backed away, reluctant to let him out of her sight, as if he might simply disappear, dissolve into the red haze. Finally, she managed to force herself to turn. She ran from his room and out of the front door, banging her elbow on the table as she went.
The corridor outside was a blood-lit gullet stretching into darkness. Somebody was yelling, closer now. Another voice, answering shrilly. Lina thought she tasted an animal tang of fear in the air itself, like bitter acid, but maybe it was just the permeating foulness made by the apparently-failing scrubbers. She looked both ways down the passage, eyes wide, heart hammering, head spinning as if she could feel the turning of the station — dizzying, disorienting, sickening.
Somebody laid a hand on her shoulder and she cried aloud, a wordless shriek of shock, just about managing to hold onto her bladder as she whirled around. Petra was there, a scarecrow figure wrapped in shadows, dark hair plastered to her face, dressed in a light shift and pyjama trousers. She looked as frightened as Lina felt, which wasn’t a good sign. Lina had never known Petra to worry about anything before. Petra had the figure and the face of a ballet dancer, but underneath it she was actually as hard as nails.
‘Petra,’ Lina whispered, her throat clamping on the word. ‘You scared me.’
‘What happened, Lina?’ Petra asked. Her fingers were combing again and again through her straight, dark hair — clawing it, really — and she was clearly shivering in her thin clothing. ‘What happened?’ she repeated, her voice becoming demanding, as if she could simply insist that Lina explain. ‘It sounded like it came from above, from the machine rooms. Was it the generators?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lina, turning to go and beckoning Petra to follow. ‘Let’s find out.’
They dashed down the corridor, heading counter-spinwards towards the nearest stairs. Lina felt totally blank-minded, detached from her running body.
A thin stream of confused and frightened people joined them, becoming a substantial tide as they neared the stairs up to the machine rooms, where the generators and power relays were. Si Davis jogged past Lina without bothering to speak, his wide form forging a pathway through the developing crowd like an ice-breaker. He took the stairs two at a time, making them ring loudly beneath him, and disappeared from view.
Lina stumbled onto the floor of the upper deck, put one hand down to right herself, and scrambled back to her feet, hotly pursued by Petra. Voices were calling up ahead, mingling into an aural blur that conveyed only fear and surprise, no real meaning. Somebody screamed, shrill and grating, chilling Lina’s blood.
The crowd thickened as they entered the machine rooms, forcing Lina to walk, pushing her way through. It seemed that everybody on the station was here, milling around, trying to see whatever was happening just outside the main generator room. The station burned with that awful red light, as if it had become a furnace.
Lina elbowed her way past Alphe, who made no effort to resist her, and stopped, stunned and open-mouthed at what she saw. An involuntary gasp escaped her throat.
Eli was leaning against the wall, hands over his face and head bowed, wrapped in the smoke that streamed from the doorway of the gennie room. A crumpled human form lay spread-eagled on the floor in front of him. A knife lay between them in a pool of glossy black liquid. But of course, it wasn’t black, Lina knew. It just looked black in the emergency lighting. It was red, wasn’t it? It was blood.
‘Nik!’ somebody screamed. ‘THAT’S NIK!’
Eli raised his face, which hung slackly from his skull like an ill-fitting mask. A thin string of saliva depended from his lower lip. ‘I didn’t mean to. . .’ he croaked, his eyes wandering to the sprawled body of Nik Sudowski. ‘I didn’t mean to. . .’
Ella Kown burst from the crowd like a cork from a bottle, her stun-baton crackling in her hand. She stopped in front of Eli, poised in momentary indecision.
‘What the hell happened here?!’ demanded Ella. Another of her team emerged to stand beside her, and Lina saw with a little dismay that it was Jayce, fully armoured-up. If you could ever count on a person to make a situation worse, Jayce was the man.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Eli said again, a note of pleading entering into his voice. ‘He. . . Nik. . .’